Hermann-Eberhard Wildermuth

Hermann-Eberhard Wildermuth (23 October 1890-9 March 1952) was an Oberst of Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht during World War II. He notably commanded the festung of Le Havre, France at the time of Operation Astonia in 1944, and he later entered West German politics as a Free Democratic Party of Germany member.

Biography
Hermann-Eberhard Wildermuth was born in Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, German Empire on 23 October 1890, and he served in the Imperial German Army during World War I. He was involved with the Deutsche Bank, the Ministry of Labor, and the German Society for Public Works (of which he was president) during the Interwar period, and he led a battalion of students in Tubingen to quell uprisings against the Weimar Republic. Wildermuth was a convinced patriot and brave army officer, but he vehemently opposed Nazism and the Nazi Party, and he was supportive of the 20 July plot in 1944, despite taking no part in the actual attempt on Hitler's life.

During World War II, Wildermuth was drafted as a reserve major, and he took command of a regiment during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1942 and another regiment in Italy in 1943. On 12 August 1944, he was appointed commandant of Le Havre, which was declared a festung ("fortress") by Adolf Hitler, meaning that Wildermuth was to hold it to the last man. Wildermuth defended the city from the Allies during Operation Astonia, and the Allies refused his humane request to evacuate the civilians of the city; 2,000 French civilians were killed in the Royal Air Force bombardment of Le Havre. Wildermuth himself would be wounded in the leg, and he surrendered to the British; he was satisfied with his role in commanding the garrison, as he had tied down two British Army divisions for two weeks.

Wildermuth had a lucid vision of Germany after the war while he was in captivity; he expected that Germany would be divided between the democratic West Germany and the communist East Germany, expected the Allies to seek to rebuild democracy in West Germany from the local level up, and knew that the Allies would need the help of the German elites. Wildermuth prepared papers on the management of Germany for the British while imprisoned at Trent Park, and he became a Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP) member after the war. From 1947 to 1950, he served in the [Wurttemberg Landtag, and he served as Federal Minister for Housing from 1949 to 1952. In this role, he oversaw the construction of 370,000 new homes in 1950, supported wheelchair-accessible homes for disabled veterans, and won the admiration of the opposition party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, for his human decency and his reliability. He died in Tubingen in 1952 at the age of 61.